The Unified Virginia Quality Birth to Five (VQB5) system supports publicly funded birth-to-five education programs with qualitative evaluations from trained observers to improve classroom quality.  JMU CARE™’s Executive Director Dr. Maryam S. Sharifian has been working with VQB5 since state law passed the legislature for it in 2020.  JMU’s Early Childhood Initiatives program (the predecessor of JMU CARE™) assisted with classroom observations for VQB5 using the CLASS evaluation metric while the VQB5 system was still building its infrastructure to carry out these observations on their own.

Virginia's early childhood system must ensure that all children have quality teaching and learning experiences that meet their unique needs. To do this, Virginia has developed the Unified Virginia Quality Birth to Five System (VQB5) which recognizes the impact of every classroom, provides feedback to every educator, and supports all publicly funded birth-to-five programs to improve.

VQB5 is a measurement and improvement system that focuses on the quality of all publicly-funded birth-five classrooms and supports families to choose quality programming across different program types. VQB5 sets shared expectations for measuring quality and supporting teachers for all birth to five programs. Through VQB5, teachers and leaders will receive the feedback and support they need to help young children learn. (Virginia Department of Education, 2022)

VQB5 utilizes the CLASS tool which sends certified reliable observers into classrooms to note and measure the teacher behaviors that research has shown to have the best outcomes for children. Teachers receive a CLASS score and focused feedback from their observer in an effort to help them continually improve their teaching practice (Virginia Early Childhood Foundation, 2021).